Bill Gates plots a surprise attack on the energy sector

By Bruce Wallace
PARIS, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Bill Gates grows most animated
when the talk turns to the "cool" new energy technologies that
have yet to leave the lab.
Gates was a rare civilian sharing the limelight alongside
presidents and prime ministers at the opening session of Paris
climate talks on Monday.
Offstage, in a barren conference room, he excitedly
described the possibility of generating energy through the
long-speculated process of artificial photosynthesis, using the
energy of sunshine to produce liquid hydrocarbons that could
challenge the supremacy of fossil fuels.
"If it works it would be magical," says Gates, hugging his
elbows to his side and rocking lightly in his seat.
"Because with liquids you don't have the intermittency
problem that batteries do . You can put the liquid into a big
tank and burn it whenever you want.
"There are dozens of things like that that are high risk but
huge impact if they are successful."
Gates was in Paris to push his latest bit of entrepreneurial
philanthropy: the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, an informal
club of 28 private investors from around the world, including
several hedge fund billionaires who have agreed to follow his
lead and pump seed money into energy research and development.
Gates believes the energy sector suffers from a dearth of
such funding, the reason much of the world is still burning coal
for its power.
A readiness to put another billion dollars of his own money
into what is already a roughly billion-dollar portfolio of
energy investments was also enough for Gates to convince 20
governments to commit to doubling their own R&D investments
within five years.
"If we are to avoid the levels of warming that are dangerous
we need to move at full speed," the co-founder of Microsoft (O:MSFT) told
a trio of journalists including from Reuters.
Gates says the energy sector's complacency about developing
new technologies makes it ripe for disruption. "We need to
surprise them that these alternative ways of doing energy can
come along and come along in an economic way," he says.
Gates has become a devotee of Vaclav Smil, a little-known
Czech-Canadian professor of the environment at the University of
Manitoba in Winnipeg whom he calls "the best energy author there
is".
Smil has written extensively about the long periods of time
required for new energy technologies to take off. Oil, gas,
nuclear: for all, the period from invention to widespread
deployment was half a century.
It's a warning to those who think new technologies will be a
quick fix for the warming planet, though Gates thinks new energy
sources can be moved to market faster these days.
"I'm more of an optimist than Vaclav," he says, noting that
"the world, scientifically, is far more sophisticated than at
anytime in the past - our understanding of material science, our
ability to simulate things, just the number of scientists and
engineers in the world alone."
Gates figures it will take a decade to develop two or three
breakthrough technologies, then another 20 years before the
technologies can become a core of the energy system.
Thirty years. But don't venture capitalists like to be
around to see and enjoy the returns on their investments?
"Well I hope to be alive then," he said with a slight
grimace. "I just went to my Dad's 90th birthday. And it will be
my 90th birthday in 2045."